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SPARC News

SPARC Stage Two is Approved!

On January 29, 2021 Dr. Gene Civillico, the SPARC program manager, presented the concept clearance for stage two of the SPARC program. The concept was approved and is expected to launch in FY 2022. The presentation is available to watch here.

Cardiopulmonary Regulation Workshop

An executive summary and video recordings of the Autonomic Neural Mechanisms of Cardiopulmonary Regulation workshop, hosted by SPARC and the National, Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), are now available on the NHLBI website.

NIH News

NIHFunding Opportunities

NOT-AT-21-002

Notice Of Special Interest (NOSI): Promoting Research on Interoception and Its Impact on Health and Disease (NOT-AT-21-002) aims to encourage research that will develop innovative technologies, identify mechanisms underlying interoception, investigate the role of interoception in health and diseases, or develop and validate predictive biomarkers, computational models, and/or artificial intelligence–based models and applications.

PAR-20-155

Academic-Industrial Partnerships (AIP) to Translate and Validate In Vivo Imaging Systems (PAR-20-155) aims to stimulate translation of scientific discoveries and engineering developments in imaging, data science and/or spectroscopic technologies into methods or tools that address contemporary problems in understanding the fundamental biology, potential risk of development, diagnosis, treatment, and/or disease status for cancer or other diseases.

PAR-20-133

Gastrointestinal (GI) and Microbiome Explorers: Development of Swallowable Smart Pills or Devices for Precision Nutrition, Microbiome and Digestive Disease Applications (PAR-20-133) aims to support the development of tools/devices for sampling or monitoring of diet- gastro-intestinal (GI) (contents and mucosa) and microbial interactions (GI- Microbiome Explorer).

The SPARC Portal Report

Since the release of the last newsletter, the SPARC Portal has once again gained several new and exciting features and functionality, including improved flatmaps and 3D scaffolds as well as various new high-quality datasets. As always, details about the developments can be found in the SPARC Portal Release Notes. Additional major updates are planned over the next few months. These include a site-wide overhaul of the search functionality to better comply with FAIR data standards and to offer more user-friendly browsing; support for directly analyzing data from the Portal; new viewers for a wide range of file types; as well as new simulation and analysis services on o2S2PARC ‒ such as neurosimulation post-processing to determine recruitment curves and stimulation selectivity indices, data-aware JupyterLab notebooks, quality assurance measures, and a revised edition of the SPARC Minimal Information Standard (MIS) that will encompass computational modeling and derived data, a transparent version history, and much more!

New to the SPARC Portal? Check out our Portal Walkthrough on the SPARC YouTube channel!

SPARC Data and Resource Center (DRC) Dispatch

The SPARC DRC has hosted several webinars over the past few months, which are available on the brand new SPARC YouTube channel! Be sure to check out these webinars and subscribe to the channel!

SPARC supports the Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles, which state: “Sound, reproducible scholarship rests upon a foundation of robust, accessible data. For this to be so in practice as well as theory, data must be accorded due importance in the practice of scholarship and in the enduring scholarly record. In other words, data should be considered legitimate, citable products of research. Data citation, like the citation of other evidence and sources, is good research practice and is part of the scholarly ecosystem supporting data reuse.” To promote reproducibility and give credit to SPARC investigators who publish their data, we recommend the following practices for citing a SPARC dataset. To make it easy, the SPARC portal provides the full data citation, including the option of different formats, under the About tab of each dataset landing page.

The SPARC Knowledge Management Core (K-Core) is the newest official member of the SPARC DRC! They function as the curation and knowledge management hub for SPARC, working closely with the other cores on increasing the quality and FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) of SPARC datasets and building the SPARC Knowledge Graph and services. An aspect of this knowledge management function is illustrated by the ApiNATOMY framework — a modeling methodology of multi-scale physiology systems — which K-Core uses to collect, store, categorize, mine, and process data into knowledge. For more information, please see the ApiNATOMY Knowledge Representation for Multi-Scale Physiology Route Modeling publication!

Do you want to find out what all the fuss is about “FAIR?” Make a plan to attend the INCF virtual Neuroinformatics Assembly and visit the website to see the program, submit an abstract, and register for the event. Notably, on Monday April 19th at 11-12:30 EST, two of our SPARC DRC PIs, Drs. Maryann Martone and Joost Wagenaar will give their insights in an “Introduction to INCF & Perspectives of FAIR.” This will be followed by a session on “General FAIR approaches for neuroscience: practical use cases for FAIR,” chaired by the head of the SPARC Curation Team, Dr. Anita Bandrowski. We hope to see you there!

Action Potential

Have opinions on how the SPARC Portal could be improved? We are always looking for autonomic neuroscience and bioelectronic medicine researchers (at all levels, from PhD to PI, and in all ways, from basic research to data modeling and device development) willing to provide input on how the SPARC Portal can better meet your needs. Email [email protected] to let us know if you'd be interested in upcoming opportunities.

SPARC Hackathon!

Preparations for the public SPARC hackathon are underway! The hackathon will be focused on leveraging FAIR data to generate novel findings! If you’re interested in hearing more details about the Hackathon and the fantastic prizes that will be awarded, please sign up for the SPARC listserv to receive regular SPARC updates.

NANS-NIC Call for Session Proposals

The North American Neuromodulation Society and the Neuromodulation Interfaces Conference are hosting a NANS-NIC virtual joint meeting on June 25-26, 2021. The NANS-NIC Planning Committee is inviting session topic proposals: submit a proposal.

SPARC bioRxiv Channel

Keep up to date with the latest SPARC research pre-prints by visiting the SPARC bioRxiv channel.